May 12, 2016 AT 1:00 am

From the mail bag…

I’ve been watching Ask an Engineer and Wearable Wednesday for a while, and reading fun walkthroughs on the site for a year or two. I’m more of a coder than a builder (and more of a cook than a coder), but when one of my ice cream machines had a short, I knew exactly what to do. I ordered less than $50 worth of soldering equipment from Adafruit, ripped out the short, soldered in new components and applied some heat-shrink tubing. I was able to get everything up and running in under half an hour because you guys had already taught me how to do some basic work with electronics.

Thanks for all your hard work and non-evilness, guys!

-Ben E.

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.